You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

There are those that hate Adam Sandler movies and those that defend them. Early on I was one that defended them. He first movies had him playing similar parts and I understand him wanting to branch out to different types of characters, but what in the hell is he thinking sometimes? I have but haven’t watched his last two movies(which look pretty good) but thought i would give this a shot since it seemed so over the top. I can not actually believe this got the green light. Admittedly there were a few times i laughed but those were few and far between. In the end I really just wanted my 2 hours back. It took me almost 4 hours to get through it. i was so bored i kept pausing to do something else. i didn’t rate this super low because it did have a few moments and i do appreciate the filmmakers desire to whatever they wanted, despite what i am sure they were told. I can promise that i will not watch this again though. I was also disappointed that one of my favorite actors, John Turturro, couldn’t even save this. i guess in hindsight the poster should have tipped me off.

My rating 4.0 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

American Ninja

This movie originally came out in 1985 when i was a young teenager. Like many teenagers back then I was obsessed with martial arts and ninjas. This movie (like many others around that time) was made to profit off that obsession. I have not seen the movie since maybe 1986 or 1987. When i saw this was coming on TV i was stoked, remembering how fond I was of it. It took about 10 minutes for it to be painfully obvious that I didn’t have the most discerning eye in 1985. The action scenes are absolutely laughable. I know we (Americans) didn’t know much about martial arts in the mid ’80s but wow was this bad martial arts. Action movie directing has gotten substantially better in the last 15 years or so but realizing that Jackie Chan’s Police story was made in the same year as this, shows there was good martial arts direction going on back then.

So the martial arts was pretty bad. The action editing was bad. The acting was pretty bad (even from some known good actors). The story and writing (especially the dialogue) was bad. Despite all of this, the movie was not too bad. I mean it won’t win any awards but it was better than some $100 million crap fests that come out today. It was 100 time better than the random Lifetime movie. It might just be bad enough to use as a revenge movie when your wife or girlfriend makes you watch the notebook, but maybe not good enough to waste your action movie night on.It has the production value of a high end B movie. It is not Asylum bad but not big budget either.

This movie made over $10,000,000 with a budget of $500,000 which shows you how much young people were into ninjas back then. This is a huge cheesfest but in the end is a decent bit of fun, despite the contrived and easily guessed plot and bad acting.

My rating 6.0 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Black Tide: Light From Above

I first heard of this band when the song Shockwave was released for download on the game Rock Band. it only took me playing that song 1 time before i began looking for the album. That song was just  taste of what was to come. too often a band releases the only good song off thier album as a single. you end up buying the album and listening to 8 tracks of filler crap and the one single you like. This is not one of those albums. From the opening song Shockwave to the bonus song Black Widow, this album rocks hard. I promise you won’t be thinking about these guys being under the age of 18 when you hear the great vocals and shreding guitar riffs. There ended up being only one song I would take of the album. This is one of the best debut metal albums in years. I jsut hope these guys can keep up the great riffs and writing with thier next few albums. While many would call me a stupid, i would say this is better than Metallica’s kill ‘em all so hopefully they can grow as much as thier heroes in the coming years.

Bottom line: You need to buy this record if you like metal!

My rating 8.5 out of 10

Here is one of the songs.

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

It has been 4 years since Dodgeball first came out, and it is still as funny as when it first came out. I remember being extremely excited for the movie because I loved the director’s Terry Tate Reebok shorts. This movie has allot of the same feel of those shorts and I love it. My wife called me mean for laughing so hard at the “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball” scene. Maybe she is right but damn if those guys getting hit in the face with a wrench didn’t make my stomach hurt from laughter. This movie has tons of of top notch performances. Ben Stiller is just down right silly and I am not sure how many takes he ruined but i don’t see how people kept a straight face while acting in the scenes with him.

Some others really stood out as well. Stephen Root turns in his best performance since Office Space(I don’t think he can top that one ever). Jason Batman and Rip torn were also very funny in their roles. The ref from American Gladiators as the tourney ref was a bonus as well.I laughed more overall in this movie than any movie I have seen in months. I know many people avoid this type of humor (low brow for the most part) but I think they are missing out. The movie is full of quotable scenes and really laugh out loud humor. If you like to laugh, this should be near the top of your list.

My rating 8.5 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Here is one of the old terry tate shorts if you have not seen them.Awesome stuff!

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

If you have not heard of it, The King of Kong is a documentary about a couple of guys competing for the world record of Donkey Kong. Like any documentary, it is hard to know exactly how truthful everything is. I felt there was enough statements and context of those to come to my conclussion though. That conclusion is Billy Mitchell is an imature jerk. Some would say this movie was edited to make him look that way but he didn’t need any extra help. The movie follows Steve Wiebe as he trys to claim the world record set by Billy Mitchell 20 years prior. If by chance Billy’s name sounds familiar, it may be from when he beat Pac-Man by playing through the entire game perfectly. There is no doubt Billy is amazing at classic video games and he doesn’t mind telling you that.

I won’t ruin the movie but, if you like video games and a good villian (whether you root for him or against him) you should give this a watch. It ended up being much more interesting than I thought and you get to see a few really angry nerds. Nothing is funnier than really angry nerds!

My rating 7.5 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Hancock

I was intrigued when I first saw this trailer, especially since i hadn’t head of it. I usually know about big movies before they come out and Super hero is one of my favorite genres. I am really not sure how this got by me. Anyway i was excited to see this based on the trailer and I usually like Will Smith. I don’t know that he is quite as good as people make him out to be but he usually does well enough.

This movie was part of what I was expecting and just a bit more. It has a nice plot twist that i didn’t see coming. Overall the story was interesting and not too bad. It wasn’t ground breaking by any means but It was better than Jumper and Wanted. Will Smith was pretty good as the drunken reluctant super hero but it was pretty much just like all of his action movie performances. I thought Jason Batmen was very good and held the movie together. The action sequences were good but could have been much better if they focused less on special effects and more on fighting in my opinion.

All in all i would recommend this to someone who likes action and Will Smith but if wither one of these is not your cup of tea, then stay away.

My rating 6.0 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Never Back Down

I must admit that i am a big fan of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and was intrigued yet cautious when i heard about this film. It ended up being pretty much what i expected, a modern day Karate Kid. It gave me more than i expected in some areas though. I was pretty happy with the MMA aspects of the movie. it was not entirely true to life (well some things were way wrong) and that bothered me   times. One in particular was when a fighter was in a triangle choke he picked up the other fighter and slammed him on the concrete and the other fighter had no major ill effects from it. If you were to really be slammed on your back like that onto concrete you would be hurt badly and bleeding from some pretty bad road rash. If you don’t understand what i just said, just know it is not all realistic.

When i say this is a modern day Karate Kid, know that i am not exaggerating. At times it really seems like the movie studio hired the writer and told him to write The Karate Kid with MMA. Judging from the writers credits he seems like a write for hire kind of writer (this is not a bad thing by the way) so this is most likely true, but he honestly did a pretty good job with most of it. If i were a young person i might like this more than i liked Karate Kid when i was a kid. The movie follows Karate Kid plot lines all over though. Boy moves to new town, meets girl he likes. Said girl’s boyfriend is a bad ass jerk that kicks our hero’s ass. Hero trains with awesome guy that offers sage advice. Boy enters tournament to fight jerk and put him in his place. Boy gets injured in the tournament but continues on. Any of this sound familiar?

All those similarities aside I really did enjoy many parts of this film and never really thought about stopping it.   scenes were done pretty well with some being done very well. i really liked the idea of on-line video sharing playing a big part since i think it would in real life if such a story happened in real life, although i think if real names and fights were posted on-line the police might get involved. I think the MMA stuff was much closer to real life than the Karate was in old movies like Karate Kid and the like and that helped my enjoyment, but i would still like to see an even more realistic approach and show the real pain and heartache real fighters go through. I really hope this leads to more MMA movies and with the rise of UFC it might very well do that. So in the end it wasn’t in any way the best action movie i have seen this year, it was very watchable and perhaps even rewatchable.

My rating 7 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Stranger than Fiction

It took me a while to get to this one. I knew I wanted to see it since I saw the trailer but just never got to it. i passed on it every time at the theater and just kept passing up seeing it at home until last night. I don’t know why i kept passing it up, since i like Will Ferrell and thought the premise seemed interesting, but I did time after time. I can now say I was making a bad choice most of the time i passed it up. This was almost everything I thought it would be and a bit more. i say almost because it was not as funny as i thought it would be. It did have a nice amount of humor, but not near enough to be a comedy (which i thought it was).

The story is far fetched and kind of ludicrous but I never really questioned it. I am not sure why but it just kinda made sense to me. Will Ferrell is very good in this film. In my opinion this is his best performance to date. i might watch some of his funnier stuff more often but this is by far his best. He did a great job a playing a strange and slightly funny character without taking it way over the top. This movie did a great job at making me care for the characters and proved to be very touching overall.

My rating 8.5 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Wanted

Wanted movie poster

I was enthralled by this trailer like many other people. I knew it looked to be a high on action, low on substance type of movie but I didn’t care. The trailer showed some pretty cool special effects and I am a sucker for those. I must say that on the surface I got what I expected. In reality i got much less. The plot was absolutely ridiculous. I know I said i wasn’t expecting one, but if you are going to try to portray an elaborate idea then you damn sure better make sure you can fill all the plot holes and answer all the questions the audience will have. This movie did absolutely none of  those. I couldn’t believe how big of a story they tried to tell with so little pertinent info. It reminded me allot of the movie Jumper, which suffered from the same problems.

The action was also a bit of a problem. I was excited for the over the top action from the trailer and I got that and much more. The problem is that the much more was much less. There were some cool special effects and many over the top action scenes, but many seemed to have no reason and the really crazy stuff was not always pulled off very well. The training session made very little sense and seemed more of a waste of time than actually moving the story along. The entire thing seemed convoluted. My rating is not really low because i did enjoy many of the action scenes but I don’t know that I will watch it again.

My rating 6 out of 10

Here is the trailer.

Duma key

Duma Key is the latest Novel by best selling author Stephen king. I must admit i am a big fan of king and Horror in general so take that for what it is worth. This novel has some typical King tendencies. The character build up is long and very in depth. I persona;;y have always liked this aspect of his writing but some people have told me that hate this and don’t read him for this reason. I tend to think it makes me care for the characters a bit more and have something invested in them, so if they are in danger it makes me care a bit more. This happened several time for me in this book. I really found myself caring for the characters and was very moved when they were in danger.These are some of the most believable characters he has ever created in my opinion.

King used the fact that the book was written in first person past tense to foreshadow some big moments, which i thought worked very well in keeping me interested. This book is not nearly as scary as some of his past efforts but it is not supposed to be. It does have a good bit of imagination and some nice thrills and a few solid scares. This is one heck of a ghost story. I drive allot for my job so i listened to this on audio book. It was well read and the reader was easy to listen to.

My rating 9.0 out of 10 for the book.

My rating 7.0 out of 10 for the audio book.

Review by Elvis Lawson

Here is the trailer.